Back to the desk

Lesson 1.2 gave you the picture: a very well-read assistant who can only see the papers on
the desk in front of them.

Two things follow, and you have probably met both by now.

The desk is empty each morning. A new session knows nothing about yesterday. Not your
project, not your decisions, not the bug you spent an hour on.

The desk fills up. Within one long session, papers pile up until the important ones are
buried.

What a full desk feels like

This is worth learning to recognise, because the symptoms look like the agent getting worse
rather than the context filling up.

  • It repeats work it already did an hour ago.
  • It contradicts a decision you agreed earlier in the same session.
  • It forgets your project’s conventions and writes in a different style.
  • It re-reads files it has already read.
  • Replies get slower and cost more (Lesson 1.5 — the whole conversation goes with every
    message).
  • It gives a confident answer about a file, which turns out to be the version from before
    your last three changes.

People call this context rot: as the context window fills, the useful parts get harder
for the model to find, and quality drops.

The fix nobody wants to hear

Start a new session.

It feels wasteful. You have “built up” all that shared understanding. But you have not built
up understanding — you have built up text, most of it now irrelevant, some of it actively
misleading because it describes code that has since changed.

A fresh session with a good short summary beats a tired session with everything.

When to start fresh

  • You have finished a step and are moving to the next.
  • You have switched to a different part of the project.
  • You have gone three rounds on a problem without progress (Lesson 4.6).
  • It just said something clearly wrong about a file.

The obvious problem with starting fresh

Every new session starts with an empty desk, and you have to explain your project again.

Unless the explanation is written down where the agent can read it by itself.

That is the rest of this module.

Try this before the next lesson

  1. Look at your longest session. Find the point where quality dropped. What had filled up?
  2. Start a fresh session and ask what the project does. Notice how much you have to explain.
  3. Write down the three things you find yourself explaining every time.
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